Adidas is taking Australian fashion label White Fox to court, accusing the brand of selling and advertising clothes with a four-stripe design that is “deceptively similar” to its famous three-stripe logo.
The German sportswear giant said it had asked White Fox several times since March to stop selling and promoting the clothes, but the Sydney-based company refused.
White Fox is a fast-fashion online retailer popular with teenagers and young adults in Australia, the UK and the US. It has grown its profile using billboards, bus adverts and influencers, often university-aged.
In the Federal Court on Friday, lawyers for White Fox denied any breach of trademark.
While White Fox has not yet filed a formal defence, its lawyers told Justice Ian Jackman that the firm plans to argue that other well-known Australian brands such as Cotton On, Sportscraft and Glassons sell clothes with “similar decorative stripes”.
Lawyers for Adidas told the court that White Fox, by advertising and selling its clothes with four stripes, had the “intention to trade off our reputation”.
A three to four-day trial is expected to take place early next year, the court heard.
In its written statement of claim, Adidas says its three-striped design has a “substantial and valuable reputation” in Australia, where it has been trademarked since 1957.
The company says that since at least March, White Fox has been selling and advertising clothes with four parallel stripes of equal width, which it claims infringes its trademark.
White Fox’s designs are “substantially identical with or otherwise deceptively similar” to Adidas, the company claims.
It also argues that White Fox’s adverts for its four-striped clothes and White Fox-branded socks feature people wearing “genuine” Adidas items.
This might lead Australians to think Adidas is linked to White Fox and has approved the design, the documents claim.
The company says White Fox is “drawing an association in the minds of consumers” between the two brands, or at least “sailing close to the wind”.
Adidas, which reported €24.8 billion (£21bn; $28bn) in revenue in 2025, is also seeking damages, saying White Fox must pay it the profit from the products plus interest and costs.
Evidence provided by Adidas included side-by-side comparisons of its products with White Fox clothes, including sweatpants and lounge shorts, as well as images of billboards on buses and at bus stops.
In one example, Adidas claimed that an online listing from June 2025 showed a pair of White Fox-branded socks being modelled by someone wearing pink Adidas shoes.
A few days after the court proceedings were lodged last month, the Adidas logo on the shoes was digitally altered to remove one of the stripes, the documents alleged, and a week later, all three stripes were scrubbed from the image.
In 2013, Adidas successfully sued Pacific Brands in Australia for selling shoes with four stripes.
White Fox was launched in 2013 by Georgia and Daniel Contos and is privately owned by the Greek-Australian couple and Daniel’s mother, Melina Maceri. It has a growing presence in the US and expanded into the UK market in 2024.
In the 12 months to June 2025, the company generated AU$542m (£286m; $377m) in revenue, a four-fold jump from its 2022 figure of $121m, according to the Australian Financial Review.
